16 thousand pigs drown on Guangxi farm amid heavy flooding

Sixteen thousands pigs drowned on a Guangxi farm this past Sunday amid heavy rainfall. Tens of thousands of corpses can now be seen floating in the water in a morbid cavalcade, and local authorities are struggling to deal with the hog wash.Dahua Yao Autonomous County, where the farm is situated, was one of the areas most affected by the storms in Guangxi, recording 390 mm of rainfall within 20 hours. The downpour, the heaviest ever seen in the county, flooded the whole farm within a matter of minutes.The flood came so quickly that it caught the owner off guard.“By the time I had moved a pack of animal feed, the water level had already rose to waist level,” he said.Thousands of dead hogs surfaced in the water and began decaying, emitting a nauseating smell that can be detected within the surrounding several hundred meters. A few of the more fortunate pigs survived by crawling ashore or by climbing on top of the house.Deputy Head of Guangxi Animal Health Inspection Department said that this is the first time so many dead pigs have shown up in the water at once, and the county government has set up eight teams tasked with decontamination the area.The scene rekindles horrid images of Shanghai’s notorious hog wash in 2013, when some 10,000 dead pigs were dumped into the Huangpu River by farmers in Jiaxing and Zhejiang province.A burial location for the dead pigs was chosen yesterday, and officers began removing the carcasses from the water today.The whole treatment is expected to be completed within seven days, by which time, we’re imagining pork soup will already be coming out of the taps.[Images via NetEase]By Joyce Ng